over time increasing amounts of online activities and media consumption will require you to be booted under such an environment. Eventually, you won't be able to do online banking, for example, without being on a "trusted platform".
Funny how the "trusted platforms" will be the ones which are the least secure (Windows) and the really secure platform (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) will be not trusted.
Companies like Dell sell a lot of Computers and, like it or not, most of them have Windows. I could imaging that Dell gets a nice discount on their Windows licenses which saves them a lot of money. I know that Dell also officially offers Linux computers but they are pretty difficult to find on their Website, are more expensive and basically make Linux a dumb choice over Windows.
Suppose Dell were to really promote Linux, selling the Linux boxes cheaper (because they have no Windows licenses). I wonder what would happen to their nice Windows discount?
I agree. But I never thought of this until I saw someone else do it. It works perfectly. Unfortunately, a box cutter is something you don't usually have in your kitchen. I have to go to the basement work room.
Yet it is still an intermittent energy source so you will need some storage mechanism or backup generator increasing the system costs further.
A storage mechanism would be great but the "backup generator" you are talking about already exists in the current power grid. Solar and Wind don't have to replace the entire grid. The current sources (coal for the most part in Germany) supply electricity when the solar and power don't produce enough.
Just wait until electric cars become popular. Then we'll have a problem.
Solar and Wind are not a complete solution, at least not until you can store electricity efficiently. You still need sources which output can be controlled, such as coal. But you can reduce your total CO2 output (and your dependency on foreign sources) by a lot.
It reminds me of a/. discussion where one poster believed that bicycles were every bit as bad as cars (as far as the environment was concerned) because you need oil for a bike just like you do for a car. The point is, it doesn't have to completely eliminate fossil fuels but if it can reduce them by half it's a great help.
But Germany reaching their goal of solar providing for 1/3 of their power would be an impressive feat.
This is true and I think it's great. But, like in Canada, in Germany wind is a much more efficient solution that is already price competitive in with coal and nuclear. You see a lot of wind mills popping up by private investors that are making money without government subvention.
I think the space shuttle was a far greater achievement than we realize and one that no other country has been able to match. It could carry heavy payloads and 7 crew members. It had a cargo bay for other research as well. Still, I think the Russian approach had the advantage of being cost effective.
You don't necessarily need to put 7 people into space for many applications and they have their Proton rocket for heavy loads. If we had that model, we'd still probably be in space, simply because it doesn't cost much. And the other advantage I see with the Russian approach is that they have all the bugs worked out.
Yes, how true. I was reading recently that tape (as a backup medium) is making a comeback because it lasts longer, the transfer speed is very high and you can store terabytes of information on them. I'm wondering if there will be a return to tape for household use, perhaps for similar reasons. Archiving your own pictures and home videos on a longer lasting medium seems like a good idea.
What I was thinking about, though, were the blogs and news reports saying basically "See it doesn't work" when minor glitches happen or someone in the process complains that they can't do something they used to be able to do. There was a slew of reports that Munich was going back to Windows when, in fact, it was just a few PC's (2 or 3) that were going to continue on Windows because the software for that application wasn't rewritten for Linux yet.
We made the decision to use Linux in our medium sized business. Going to Linux has been a very good decision. Using Java has been mixed.
I'd bet that the city of Munich is grinning right now, knowing that their investment in open source is already paying off.
The M$ fans are constantly looking for something... anything.. to criticize. Every now and then they'll find a secretary who can't install her favorite screensaver from home, but the functionality of the system works and it starting to be looked at by other cities.
Well, I think the prominent headline, "GIMP on Linux - Compile it yourself!" tells you the sort of people who designed it.
I use gimp and have for many years and i never had to compile it. I think the gist of that statement is that you can modify and compile it if you need to.
Yes!! When you look at Java it is full of syntax from the C and C++. Sounds like a lawsuit to me. And I really hope there is one. I really hate oracle. Greedy jerks. But I also despise a system which would even allow something like this.
At this point it appears that China is the only country that isn't controlled by the same multinational corporations that govern the US, and has any chance of not becoming part of the same game.
This is really, really scary for open source and GNU-like projects
Not just that. The whole thing is really scary for any software you write. Some of this is obvious and has been done long before they did it. Oracle is probably just as guilty of API infringement -- it's basically unavoidable. And the ridiculous patents. Oracle just got one patent upheld for removing duplicate constants. Compilers have been doing that since the beginning of time and every valid unique SET does that.
You know, you might just be on to something there. Don't tax corporations at all. At first I kind of rolled my eyes but actually I think you have a good point. Just tax income to people but tax it at a fair rate -- don't tax some stuff (like capital gains) less. Income is income.
However, my personal favorite would be to just have a sales tax (except for food, clothes and housing), no income tax, no property tax, no other taxes except for usage fees. Of course, it would be a huge sales tax, but think of how simple our tax returns would be.
I've had no problems with Hotmail but I don't usually use it with Windows which may be why I've had not issues. However, many years ago I had another hotmail account which got totally spammed. I couldn't use it because it filled up with spam so quickly that the small space they allowed back then was full in a matter of hours. If you could log in, you couldn't remove the spam as quickly as it was coming in.
The monopoly part was for pushing their browser, not the operating system.
In my humble opinion, they basically still pull the same tricks with the OS that they always have to force vendors to sell with Windows. Doesn't it seem funny that all of the big PC vendors, while claiming to offer linux PC's, virtually hide them. Try finding one on Dell, for example. And then when you find one, it's more expensive than the same one with Windows. For that, I'm guessing some of these vendors get a preferred Windows price.
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Thank you. I'm glad someone said that.
over time increasing amounts of online activities and media consumption will require you to be booted under such an environment. Eventually, you won't be able to do online banking, for example, without being on a "trusted platform".
Funny how the "trusted platforms" will be the ones which are the least secure (Windows) and the really secure platform (Linux, FreeBSD, etc) will be not trusted.
So I wonder if Firefox and Chrome under Linux will require it?
Does this mean that if Debian gets a key that all derivatives of Debian (Ubuntu, Linux Mint, etc) will be bootable?
Companies like Dell sell a lot of Computers and, like it or not, most of them have Windows. I could imaging that Dell gets a nice discount on their Windows licenses which saves them a lot of money. I know that Dell also officially offers Linux computers but they are pretty difficult to find on their Website, are more expensive and basically make Linux a dumb choice over Windows.
Suppose Dell were to really promote Linux, selling the Linux boxes cheaper (because they have no Windows licenses). I wonder what would happen to their nice Windows discount?
There are all kinds of paid support options for linux as well.
I agree. But I never thought of this until I saw someone else do it. It works perfectly. Unfortunately, a box cutter is something you don't usually have in your kitchen. I have to go to the basement work room.
Yes! I've been using Linux for years. I do have a Windows 7 laptop but it's collecting dust, probably the safest way to use it.
All U-235 on Earth is going to decay eventually so either we use it before it decays or we will never be able to use it anymore.
Yes, but it has a half-life of 25,000 years so I think we can relax about that for a few hundred years.
Yet it is still an intermittent energy source so you will need some storage mechanism or backup generator increasing the system costs further.
A storage mechanism would be great but the "backup generator" you are talking about already exists in the current power grid. Solar and Wind don't have to replace the entire grid. The current sources (coal for the most part in Germany) supply electricity when the solar and power don't produce enough.
Just wait until electric cars become popular. Then we'll have a problem.
Solar and Wind are not a complete solution, at least not until you can store electricity efficiently. You still need sources which output can be controlled, such as coal. But you can reduce your total CO2 output (and your dependency on foreign sources) by a lot.
It reminds me of a /. discussion where one poster believed that bicycles were every bit as bad as cars (as far as the environment was concerned) because you need oil for a bike just like you do for a car. The point is, it doesn't have to completely eliminate fossil fuels but if it can reduce them by half it's a great help.
But Germany reaching their goal of solar providing for 1/3 of their power would be an impressive feat.
This is true and I think it's great. But, like in Canada, in Germany wind is a much more efficient solution that is already price competitive in with coal and nuclear. You see a lot of wind mills popping up by private investors that are making money without government subvention.
I think the space shuttle was a far greater achievement than we realize and one that no other country has been able to match. It could carry heavy payloads and 7 crew members. It had a cargo bay for other research as well. Still, I think the Russian approach had the advantage of being cost effective.
You don't necessarily need to put 7 people into space for many applications and they have their Proton rocket for heavy loads. If we had that model, we'd still probably be in space, simply because it doesn't cost much. And the other advantage I see with the Russian approach is that they have all the bugs worked out.
Don't Russian Fighter Jets use vacuum tubes so they won't fall out of the sky if a bomb does go off?
Yes, how true. I was reading recently that tape (as a backup medium) is making a comeback because it lasts longer, the transfer speed is very high and you can store terabytes of information on them. I'm wondering if there will be a return to tape for household use, perhaps for similar reasons. Archiving your own pictures and home videos on a longer lasting medium seems like a good idea.
Thank you, very informative.
Very true!
What I was thinking about, though, were the blogs and news reports saying basically "See it doesn't work" when minor glitches happen or someone in the process complains that they can't do something they used to be able to do. There was a slew of reports that Munich was going back to Windows when, in fact, it was just a few PC's (2 or 3) that were going to continue on Windows because the software for that application wasn't rewritten for Linux yet.
We made the decision to use Linux in our medium sized business. Going to Linux has been a very good decision. Using Java has been mixed.
I'd bet that the city of Munich is grinning right now, knowing that their investment in open source is already paying off.
The M$ fans are constantly looking for something ... anything .. to criticize. Every now and then they'll find a secretary who can't install her favorite screensaver from home, but the functionality of the system works and it starting to be looked at by other cities.
Well, I think the prominent headline, "GIMP on Linux - Compile it yourself!" tells you the sort of people who designed it.
I use gimp and have for many years and i never had to compile it. I think the gist of that statement is that you can modify and compile it if you need to.
Yes!! When you look at Java it is full of syntax from the C and C++. Sounds like a lawsuit to me. And I really hope there is one. I really hate oracle. Greedy jerks. But I also despise a system which would even allow something like this.
At this point it appears that China is the only country that isn't controlled by the same multinational corporations that govern the US, and has any chance of not becoming part of the same game.
It's sad but probably true.
This is really, really scary for open source and GNU-like projects
Not just that. The whole thing is really scary for any software you write. Some of this is obvious and has been done long before they did it. Oracle is probably just as guilty of API infringement -- it's basically unavoidable. And the ridiculous patents. Oracle just got one patent upheld for removing duplicate constants. Compilers have been doing that since the beginning of time and every valid unique SET does that.
You know, you might just be on to something there. Don't tax corporations at all. At first I kind of rolled my eyes but actually I think you have a good point. Just tax income to people but tax it at a fair rate -- don't tax some stuff (like capital gains) less. Income is income.
However, my personal favorite would be to just have a sales tax (except for food, clothes and housing), no income tax, no property tax, no other taxes except for usage fees. Of course, it would be a huge sales tax, but think of how simple our tax returns would be.
I've had no problems with Hotmail but I don't usually use it with Windows which may be why I've had not issues. However, many years ago I had another hotmail account which got totally spammed. I couldn't use it because it filled up with spam so quickly that the small space they allowed back then was full in a matter of hours. If you could log in, you couldn't remove the spam as quickly as it was coming in.
The monopoly part was for pushing their browser, not the operating system.
In my humble opinion, they basically still pull the same tricks with the OS that they always have to force vendors to sell with Windows. Doesn't it seem funny that all of the big PC vendors, while claiming to offer linux PC's, virtually hide them. Try finding one on Dell, for example. And then when you find one, it's more expensive than the same one with Windows. For that, I'm guessing some of these vendors get a preferred Windows price.